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Nasdaq had quite a night in London this week. Attending the Operational Risk Awards were representatives from both the BWise and SMARTS team. The company was honored to win four major awards that evening: BWise for Best GRC Product and Best Operational Risk Product, SMARTS for Best Financial Crime Product and Nasdaq for Best Overall Provider of the Year:

Best GRC Product: Entries should include evidence of coordinating governance, risk management and compliance activities that provide increased business intelligence and capital management in line with a company's internal policies and procedures and external laws and regulations.

Best Operational Risk Product

Best Financial Crime Product: Entries should show specific ways in which the product assists financial-sector, regulatory or law enforcement users in detecting, preventing, deterring, investigating or prosecuting crimes carried out against the financial sector.

Best Overall Provider of the Year

Co-founded in 1994, BWise was acquired by Nasdaq in 2012 and has grown into a leading vendor in the GRC space. While just over 50% of its client base is in financial services, the business also serves a number of other sectors, including manufacturing, telecommunications, automotive, life sciences and hi-tech.

The product set comprises standard GRC software components Internal Audit, Risk Management, Compliance Management, Internal Control, Information Security  and can be installed on-premise or as a cloud-based platform. BWise now delivers its platform technology in 12 standard languages, with 24/7 support on all continents.

We see this recognition as a reflection of our strategy: continuous innovation to improve product accessibility and usability, paired with ongoing expansion of platform functionality and use cases, in order to deliver high quality implementations on-time and in-budget across the globe, resulting in high customer satisfaction Peter de Verdier, VP and Head of BWise, explains.

Initially targeted at exchanges and regulators, SMARTS has extended over the past decade and the platforms client base now includes 119 sell-side and buy-side firms, as well as 45 exchanges and trading platforms, and 13 regulators.

Our market replay visualizations were used to show the judge and jury exactly how the market had been manipulated, This was probably the most significant layering case ever to have been prosecuted, and it showed clearly how layering scenarios are constructed, says Michael OBrien, head of product management for risk & surveillance Solutions.

One of the biggest recent developments for SMARTS is getting deeper into the machine learning space through our partnership with Digital Reasoning. (Fast Company recently named Digital Reasoning as one of the Top Ten Most Innovative Companies in Data Science.) The new system will combine SMARTS platforms for analyzing trading data with Digital Reasonings machine-learning technology for analyzing language used in electronic conversations. The chat data comes from cooperating brokerage firms and big banks. Financial firms must record and store the electronic communications of their traders and other employees to comply with industry regulations.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Valerie Bannert-Thurner, head of risk and surveillance solutions remarked: The [SMARTS] platform needs to cut through millions of messages and identify incidents that are truly unusual. We are increasingly taking in contextual information and external triggers such as news reports and market data to make sure that the correct scenarios are flagged.

Human nature can give criminals away. They can conceal activities while theyre doing them but they cant help themselves after.